While surfing the net I came across this article on gay comic characters, a topic I don't have a lot of expertise on. However, the two main books cited in the piece (Moon Knight and Young Avengers) are favorites of mine.
I'm not going to address the article as a whole. What I did want to say, though, is that I think there was a narrative purpose to portraying Frenchie as gay in the current Moon Knight title. I don't know whether any mention was made of his sexuality in the original series (I still haven't read that Essentials volume :))--whether he had a girlfriend, or went on dates with women*--so I don't know whether the portrayal conflicts with any earlier representation. But I think the purpose was to illustrate how dysfunctional Mark's relationships were and how little he knew about his friends and colleagues beyond what had to do with him, personally.
Remember the scene with Marlene, where he tries to convince her that she should come back to him because it was what he wanted? And was annoyed that that wasn't enough for her? He literally could not understand the difference between what he felt for her and what he wanted from her. BTW, Mark is exactly the kind of boyfriend you'd tell your friends to run away screaming from, isn't he? :)
Mark had known Frenchie for years, and the subject had never come up. I don't think Mark cared about Frenchie's sexuality in either sense--he didn't really mind it (other than being a bit offended at first that Frenchie had never told him directly), but he really didn't care about it in the same sense that he really didn't care about anything else to do with Frenchie if it didn't concern him directly. It was a way to underscore Mark's essential self-centeredness. It could have been done by means of something other than Frenchie being gay, but it would have had to have been some other significant personal fact that Mark was unaware of--something that most friends who had known each other that well for that long would have known--to have had the same impact.
* I do understand that there is reason to object when a hero or other character who was historically presented in one way is taken into the modern era and presented in another way. But people do change over time--there are plenty of men and women in the real world who don't realize their sexuality until they're in their 30s or 40s or beyond. I don't get the impression that that was intended to be the case with Frenchie, just saying that such a change is surely within the realm of reality.
2 comments:
Frenchie has at various points been hooked up with women (in both Moench and Dixon's runs), but none of his relationships ever had a depth I would consider extremely convincing; thus, him using them as beards would make sense to me.
Yeah, and he was a (semi)bad guy mercenary who was kinda mates with Marc Spector; then Marc fell in lust with a girl (Marleen) and ended up getting killed over an issue he's previously not cared about until her, and bought back to life by the god Khonshu (maybe- they on purposefully make his back story hazy; he could have actually just had a near death experience and hallucinated. The whole point of Moon Knight is that he may have supernatural powers and be the Avatar of a god, OR he may just be a whack-job. Huzar.) Anyways, so while MArc has motivation to become a superhero, no reason is ever really given for Frenchie dropping his own mercenary career to become MoonKnights pilot. Hence him being Gay and in love with Marc all the time they were working together kind of makes sense from a character motivation point of view, and doesn't really smack of a serious `retoncon' to me, more like a reveal.
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